ReadWriteWeb

All blogs on the WordPress.com platform and any WordPress.org blogs that opt-in (using this plug-in) will now make instant updates available to any RSS readers subscribed to a new feature called RSSCloud. There is currently only one RSS aggregator that supports RSSCloud, Dave Winer's brand-new reader River2. That will probably change very soon. Update: Within hours another RSS reader called LazyFeed has announced that it will support RSSCloud as well.

RSSCloud is an element that's always been present in the RSS 2.0 spec but has drawn new attention with the rise of interest in the Real-Time Web. The element was just added to the WordPress code this afternoon. The implications of this big vote of support go beyond reading WordPress blogs; this is the kind of traction that new technologies can leverage to gain support in many different applications.

Sampa, the start up company best known for allowing families to upload and privately share pictures, blog posts and other milestones is closing its doors. In a letter sent to RWW, CEO Paul Gross explains, "There is no big story behind it, just the simple version of we ran out of money and the business models we tried didn't work out."

RWW first covered Sampa in June 2006 and the service certainly evolved since then. It went from being an overly techie-looking blogging platform to a user-friendly family tool with built-in family tree, baby countdown timer and import functionality from Flickr and YouTube.

At the recent Real-Time CrunchUp 2009, Khris Loux, CEO of one of the web's largest commenting services, announced the
"death of the comment". This declaration was extremely significant as Loux's JS-Kit is currently installed on over 600,000 sites. He blames the death on social media sites like Twitter and Flickr and the rise of "parallel channels away from [the] product". In essence, dialogue has moved from a singular destination to a series of parallel but separate social networking channels.

Robert Scoble and Rackspace have just launched the long anticipated Building43 in an effort Scoble describes as, "helping usher businesses into 2010." Said teammate Rocky Barbanica, "Companies can gain so much insight through the people on Twitter, Friendfeed and Facebook. We're hoping to help them talk and listen to their customers."

Scoble describes the project as "a community for people who are fanatical about the Internet." What exactly does that mean? Scoble gave ReadWriteWeb a demo to explain.

San Francisco based social networking and blogging company Six Apart announced today at WordCamp Mid-Atlantic that it is introducing plugins that will work on rival Wordpress sites and other blogging platforms.

A couple of weeks ago, we reported that the highly popular blog host WordPress.com now allows its users to reply to comments by email, but starting today, WordPress.com is taking its email strategy even further, and now allows users to post text and images by email as well. Those WordPress.com users who subscribe to the VideoPress upgrade will now also be able to upload videos to their blogs by email, and those who subscribe to the WordPress Space Upgrade can also post MP3 attachments. The service now gives every user a 'secret' email address to sent their posts to. These addresses can be activated from the WordPress.com dashboard.

If there's one thing that social software can never get enough of, it's usability testing. Good old WordPress has the advantage of a global community of super loyal fans to tap for testing, and this morning that's just what the company announced it is going to do. WordPress usability testing is being opened up to the community of users.

It's worth noting that WordPress isn't just any chunk of software: it played a formative role in the early days by giving millions of people a voice online. It's still one of the best examples of an open source ecosystem which has been made infinitely more rich for users by involvement of outside developers than the company could have created by itself. And it's a system used by some of the biggest publishing firms in the world at a time when the publishing industry is undergoing one of its biggest periods of change ever. CNN, Time, the New York Times and millions upon millions of bloggers are all using WordPress. Helping test the next version of this software is a pretty big deal.

WordPress, on their official blog, made a short announcement that Wordpress.com blog owners could now enable reply by email support for comments made to their blog. With a couple of simple configuration changes, blog owners can get the convenience of being able to directly reply to new comments via their preferred email address instead of through the Wordpress admin interface.

Backtype, known for its fast-growing comment-aggregation service, announced the availability of a new BackType Connect plugin for standalone WordPress blogs today. The plugin uses the newly-updated Connect API to integrate comments from a variety of different sources around the internet directly in to the WordPress comment system. Supported sources include Twitter, Digg, FriendFeed, Reddit, other blogs, and of course, Hacker News (since Backtype is a YCombinator startup). Installation is straightforward and comment import happens quickly.

While Matt Mullenweg was in France for WordCamp Paris 2009, the team from ReadWriteWeb France took the opportunity to catch up with him and ask him a few questions about open source, WordPress, and the future.